


When In Doubt, Consult a Dragon

by spirrum



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Spoilers for Here Lies the Abyss, featuring everyone's favourite shapeshifter, unapologetic fix-it-fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-24
Updated: 2015-03-24
Packaged: 2018-03-19 08:26:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3603231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spirrum/pseuds/spirrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Well,” says a familiar voice. “What have we here? A bird caught in a spider’s net. Or is it the other way around?”</p><p>“You,” Hawke croaks, as the witch kneels with more grace than her years ought to allow.</p><p>Flemeth guffaws. “You sound surprised.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Behold, the result of my inability to accept a character's death.

She aches – that’s the word for it, Hawke decides. It’s a constant thing, and she can’t seem to pinpoint just where it hurts the most, or if the hurt is even a physical thing, but it doesn’t really matter. She has no way to heal either sort. 

Victory tastes more like bile than anything else, and she doesn’t know how she’s managed it, but then Hawke has done a great many inexplicable things, and she’s long since stopped questioning how they come about. The demon lies slain some ways off, and before her vision swims a world of green shadows and spirits that laugh and howl their grief for herears to hear, because there’s no one else present to listen. They take on shapes she knows – her family’s old cat slinking at the corner of her vision, across her broken leg on a spirit’s unnaturally quick paws. She thinks she sees Barlin, and a Chantry sister from her childhood, who had caught her using magic behind the farmhouse but never told a soul.

Her mother kneels by her side, and Bethany sings her a lullaby that has Hawke laughing until tears streak across her dirt-stained cheeks. It hurts when she laughs and when she breathes and she doesn’t know if she’s awake or dreaming but can you dream when already in the Fade? Hawke doesn’t know, she only knows the ache and her father’s voice, or is it Carver’s? It’s so hard to tell, and so hard to bear, but she can’t tell if the weight on her chest is due to her broken ribs or her own grief.

She doesn’t see Fenris, and for this she is so,  _so_ grateful, because the spirits might be of her own conjuring, but she’ll take this little gift as a sign that his is not a face to be found among her dead.

 _Speaking of death._  “I think I might be dying,” she tells the silence, because she doubts the spirits can hear her, and she has to say this now because she never got around to writing that letter, even if Varric had offered to send it for her so many times. “And that’s not an exaggeration this time.” She tries to smile, but her humour is as lost on the spirits as it is on anyone else, and Hawke is left with her own hollow laughter.  

“You’d be so angry if you knew,” she continues, and tries to imagine his frown but fails. Instead she tries one of his rare smiles, finds it in a memory of a sunlit day months ago when her worries were less and her hurts bearable, and when she breathes the ache lessens, if only a little. She doesn’t know if he’s smiling now, wherever he is. She doubts it. 

“I’m sorry,” she says then. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come back.” She’d imagined once that her greatest regret would be her inability to clean up her own mess – that she would die leaving the world at Corypheus’ mercy. But in a nightmare realm there is no waking from Hawke finds the only regret in her heart is not having had the chance to say goodbye.  _I am so sorry, Fenris._

There are footsteps at the edge of her hearing then, and Hawke turns her head. Frowns. The legs that meet her eyes look too tangible for a spirit’s.

“Well,” says a familiar voice. “What have we here? A bird caught in a spider’s net. Or is it the other way around?”

“You,” Hawke croaks, as the witch kneels with more grace than her years ought to allow.

Flemeth guffaws. “You sound surprised.”

At any other time her answer would have been a quick thing, off her tongue with her next heartbeat, but now her tongue feels thick in her mouth, and Hawke can only stare, wondering if she’s somehow conjured this, too. But imaginary or not, “There’s a first time for everything, I suppose,” she manages hoarsely. 

The old woman laughs – a cackling trill that almost sounds affectionate. “Ah, there was a reason I liked you. I remember now.”

“What are you doing here?” Hawke asks, a little too brusquely for what is usually her way, but there’s hope kindling in her breast that won’t allow for wit, or even simple civility. 

The witch doesn’t answer. Instead there’s something pressed into her hand, and Hawke blinks, shaking fingers closing around the soft scrap of fabric. She doesn’t need to see it to know it, and her voice trembles when she asks, “Where did you get this?”

She’s awarded a droll look. “From two elves demanding I fetch you back. The little one was polite enough, but I’ve seen better manners in the Wilds than what the tall one displayed.” She smirks. “He said it would help, if you needed persuading. Far be it for me to question the gestures of lovers.”

Hope leaps like a wild thing now, and Hawke can barely breathe. “What?”

Flemeth only looks amused. “Time moves differently here, girl. You have been gone longer than you think.”

It’s such a simple utterance, and Hawke tries to wrap her mind around the words, but – fails. There are too many thoughts in her mind.  _Merrill and Fenris?_ There’s asob in her throat, thick and heavy, but not one of grief, this time. 

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” she asks, for she is nothing if not obstinate. The hand gripping the ribbon is trembling, and she feels overwhelmed, to the point where she finds she doesn’t care if the witch is lying; if she’s another demon clad in a familiar form. Whatever awaits, it must be preferable to a slow death between the visitations of her heart’s many losses, surely. 

Flemeth snorts. “Take it from an old woman, and don’t put your faith in truth.” 

“No?” She tries to smile, but her mirth slips between her fingers. “What would you suggest I put my faith in, then? I hear the Maker is rather busy these days.”  
  
A raised brow. “You could try an old woman.”

“And is that what you are? Just an old woman?” Hawke remembers a dragon, wings spread wide against a blue sky, and a roar that echoed in the mountains. 

Flemeth laughs. “Oh, never  _just_.”

It’s a lot to hinge her trust on, but her options are scarce, and Hawke aches. And she has made stranger deals than this, she knows. She thinks of Merrill. Of Fenris. The ribbon curls between her fingers, deceptively soft, red like her life’s blood still leaping with her pulse. For a little while longer, at least.  _Perhaps just long enough._

“Alright,” Hawke says then, and wonders what manner of deal she has struck now. One far more binding than the safekeeping of an amulet, but she finds herself willing to make it, regardless. “I was getting rather tired of this scenery, anyway. It gets terribly dull.”

The witch barks a laugh. “A wise decision, if there was ever such a thing.” There are hands below Hawke’s back then, and her vision tilts until she can’t tell up from down. The Fade is a blur of green, but the hands that carry her are solid, blessedly so, and Hawke feels, inexplicably, like weeping. How long has she been here, she wonders. How long with only her ghosts for company? She doesn’t dare ask.    

“Why did you go through the trouble of finding me?” she asks instead. “It seems an awful lot of effort, for an old woman.” She cannot help herself, near delirious now with her hurts and the hope beating with frantic wings behind her broken ribs. 

“I told you something once,” Flemeth says. “Have you forgotten?” 

Hawke frowns, but finds through the haze an old memory —  _When the time comes for your regrets, remember me_. 

“You foresaw this.” 

Flemeth does not correct her. “I have seen a great many things, girl. Thrones stolen. Broken. Countries laid to waste. And glimmers of light in the darkness. Those who fix the things that are broken. Worlds and torn skies.” 

The movement makes her dizzy, but Hawke manages to find her words, somehow. “Is that why you’ve come, then? To bring me back so I can fix things?” She doesn’t know why she sounds bitter. 

There’s a chuckle. “So suspicious, I could swear it was my daughter speaking.” Hawke does not know how to respond to that, but the witch does not appear inclined to wait for a reply. “An old woman is allowed her foolish fancies,” she says. “A lad comes to me with a red ribbon, and I am intrigued. I foresaw many things, but not that. And when you see as much as I, it is what you don’t see that is truly worth seeing.”  

“Good grief,” Hawke groans. “I got half of that, I think.” But her fingers tighten around the ribbon, and she pictures Fenris, livid as life, proffering it to a dragon. _And I’m the one with the harebrained ideas, am I?_ She wants to laugh, but she’s too tired, and as her eyes slip shut it’s to a darkness free of spirits. And with the witch’s steps her aches and pains become ghosts, and Hawke leaves them behind with the rest. 

Flemeth hums. “You’ll find that sometimes, half is all one needs.” There’s a lull, before she adds, “Unless it’s stockings.” She sighs, an old sound that follows Hawke into unconsciousness. 

“Stockings should always come in pairs.” 


	2. Chapter 2

The sky has darkened on their fourth day of waiting, when his patience finally runs out.

“What is taking so long?”

His words have sharp edges, cleaving the silence in half, a poor excuse for a sword that will do no good here, and his hands twitch against his sides with restless ineptitude. But Merrill doesn’t so much as flinch, and regards him coolly from her perch on the rock she’s claimed as her own. A campfire smoulders between them, providing a meagre warmth in place of the sun that has long since ducked down behind the treetops. 

“Fenris,” she says softly, the warning a gentle one, but made firm by the slight furrow of her brows.  

“You said she could help,” he snaps, rounding on her where she sits, immersed in the weaving of some strange Dalish charm, her head tilted with acalm he can’t bring himself to understand. Not with Hawke still missing, and no sign of the witch they’d foolishly approached, seeking aid.  

“She is,” Merrill counters smoothly. “Asha’bellanar is powerful, but the Fade is a vast place. Who knows where Hawke is in all that? And she said she’d be back, didn’t she?”

“I don’t make a habit of placing my trust in the words of witches,” he tells her, turning towards the overlook. The valley below is quiet, the mist that’s come down from the mountains obscuring most of the view, and nothing stirs in the trees around them. The witch’s doing, most likely, but Fenris can’t be sure, and tries not to let his mind focus on the unnatural magic that follows the old woman around, and that lingers still. Theirs was a favour asked out of desperation more than common sense, but Hawke has been gone weeks, and Fenris was not about to look a gift shapeshifter in the mouth, for all that he trusts her about as much as he trusts any mage.

“Well it’s all we’ve got now, isn’t it?” Merrill asks with a huff. “Unless you’ve hatched some other plan while we’ve been waiting?”

He hasn’t, and he can tell she knows, and so Fenris falls silent. The fact that he can do nothing sits like an itch, and she knows that too, no doubt, which is why she doesn’t push, even when he baits her, eager for a spat – anything but the quiet and the waiting that’s about to consume him whole.

His wrist feels naked, and he wonders at the wisdom of giving the ribbon to the old hag. If she’s left them to wait in vain, fools bound to hope, what does that leave him of Hawke’s? Nothing – not even a measly scrap of fabric. Only a letter he’d rather not have, heavy in his pocket still, signed with Varric’s signature and telling him of leaving Hawke behind in the Fade to an unknown fate. 

When he’d first received it he’d been angry – furious, at Hawke for leaving in the first place, and Varric for allowing them to leave her behind, another sacrifice for their precious Inquisition. Then at Hawke again for not coming back, but – at himself, mostly, for being unable to help her, trapped realms away, if trapped is indeed all she is.

“Hawke, where are you?” he murmurs, the words lost in the mist and the dark, but there is no response. Death’s name lurks at the back of his tongue, but he swallows the bitter taste, unwilling to invoke it before the witch returns to confirm his fears. 

(Or his hopes, frail as they are, and he doesn’t know which to cling to, unwilling to choose one over the other, or just unable to, after so long without so much as a word of her whereabouts) 

After Hawke’s disappearance and Varric’s letter he’d wandered for a while, angry and restless and without a destination in mind. Then Merrill had found him, one of the last out of those he’d expected to come looking, travel-worn and weary but resolute, the naiveté he’d so often accused her of an old memory as she’d taken his half-full glass and his lackluster greeting and told him plainly where to shove both. 

And so the proposition of tracking down the old crone been made, at the back of a seedy port-side tavern with his hopes in tatters, and despite his better judgement he’d grabbed on with both hands. They may have had their differences in the past, but they have found a common cause in this, if in nothing else – something that means more than squabbles about blood magic and the ways of her people. And they’ve managed, with only minor setbacks, because their worry might be shared but his is not her patience, and even hers is worn thin when enough pressure is applied.  

Like now, with her sigh one of exasperation, a twinge fond perhaps, and loud in the quiet. “Oh would you sit down? You’ll pace yourself a hole in the ground.”

Fenris is about to comply when the snap of a twig leaps from the shadows, and his hand is on the pommel of his sword before he catches sight of the eyes through the dark as Flemeth appears from between the trees.

“Jumping at shadows, are we? Wise lad. And here I’d pegged you overconfident.” She laughs. “Shadows are the worst sort. In the dark, one should always be on guard.”

There is a response at the tip of his tongue, scathing or impatient or both, but he’s not given the chance to speak, as another voice cuts through the quiet with familiar derision. 

“Considering what lurks in it, I’m inclined to agree.” 

And stepping past the hag towards the ring of light cast by fire, her movements weary and with a slight limp to her step–

“Lethallan!”

His breath leaves him, but it’s Merrill who dashes forward, leaping quick like a rabbit to cover the distance, and he hears Hawke’s laughter before he fully catches sight of her face, her wild joy, and there’s life in that sound, though she appears weakened still, arms holding Merrill with a care he’s not used to seeing, as though her bones are made of glass and not the steel he knows.

She catches his eye over Merrill’s shoulder and her laughter becomes a sigh, a breath that leaves her in a rush and  _“Fenris”_ she says, and it’s enough to stagger him where he stands. 

Hawke is the one who moves forward first, hands reaching for his, and he realizes belatedly that he’s still gripping the pommel of his sword, and when he lets it go other things follow, harder, sharper things that have kept him company in their long days of uncertainty. He draws her close and it’s with relief, and – disbelief, but she’s solid beneath his fingertips, flesh and bone, and if they’re not as hard as they ought to be, it’s still  _Hawke._

He doesn’t know where to start, but the words come even without his volition, and so, “I feared for you,” he says against the curve of her ear, and feels her sigh in return, her breath warm against his collar. 

“I know. I’m sorry.” She doesn’t specify for what, but she doesn’t have to – he feels it in the hitch of her breath, and the tightening of her hands in his tunic.

His thoughts are racing, and he thinks he should say more, but he loses his words between the dark fall of her hair and the press of her weight against his. He knows them both, as he knows all of her, but at the same time they feel new to his touch, and in all the languages he knows, there is no expression that will do it justice. 

But there is one thing he will say.  

“You have my thanks,” he tells the witch, who seems content to linger beyond the reach of the campfire’s light, sharp eyes aglow in the dark, eerie and all-seeing. But he will curb his suspicions for now, for what she has given them. 

“Oho. A grand gift, indeed.”

Hawke snorts a soft laugh. “Grander than most are awarded, I can assure you.”

“Oh, I am assured,” the hag says drolly, but not unkindly. “And it appears our business is concluded, at least for now,” she says, but Fenris has no patience left for cryptic words, and is content to ignore the implications that sit in her laden declaration.

“Where will you go?” It’s Merrill who asks, with the fearless curiosity Fenris is certain will be her undoing. 

But the hag does not appear bothered by the query. “To find an old friend,” she says simply. “Or perhaps I am the one who will be found? He has a sharp nose, and I am not the one who hides,” she laughs, as though privy to some private joke, and Fenris decides he’d rather not know.  

Then she dons the shadows for her cloak, wraps herself in the gathering darkness with an ease that has nothing mortal about it, and leaving the eerie echo of her humour lingering in her wake. The campfire barely flickers with her departure, and a soft lull follows before the hoot of an owl reaches towards them through the dark. And slowly, the rest of the forest begins to stir, as though breathing a collective sigh of relief. 

“Well,” Hawke says. “I can only hope you’ve not bartered more than your kidneys for this little rescue.” It’s Fenris she offers the look, and he wonders if she’s only partly joking. 

“Oh we didn’t barter anything!” Merril chirps. “Asha’bellanar agreed with very little fuss.” 

“Did she now,” Hawke murmurs, but does not press the issue, and Fenris is glad of it. The less he has to see of the hag in the future, the better, but he does not dismiss the possibility that they will. But that is for another day, when Hawke does not look quite so worn. 

“I hope you’re not terribly angry with us?” Merrill asks then, slender fingers finding Hawke’s. “We thought you were lost.” 

“You know, I think I was,” Hawke says softly, squeezing her hand. “For a little while.” Her eyes meet his then, and there are things in them she won’t be speaking of, not for some time yet. 

“And what are you now?” Fenris asks. 

Hawke doesn’t answer at first, but draws from her pocket a ribbon red as blood, to wind around his wrist in silent response. And her grin is a quick thing, chasing some of the ghosts from her eyes. “Honestly? Positively starving. Would you believe there’s no food in the Fade? Can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a spider, but I’d rather not eat either.”

He snorts, and Merrill grins, and Hawke – Hawke lives, and breathes. And as she proceeds to consume the little food they have to offer with a vigour he was not aware he’d missed, he finds Merrill’s eyes, a silent understanding passing between them through the dark. They’ll handle the consequences of their actions at a later date, if there are any to be had. For now, all that matters is Hawke’s warmth tucked between them before the fire, solid and whole and laughing, and spinning a tale of the largest spider she’s ever seen as Merrill winds the woven charm into her hair. 

The Inquisition paid for their victory with her sacrifice, and they for her rescue with a yet unknown expense. But if the cost of her life proves a heavy one, they will share the weight of it between them. Perhaps it’s cowardice, pretending all is well when there might yet be worse things to come, but Fenris has had enough of heroics. 

And the coward’s path seems the preferable option, if it means she’ll have a full night’s sleep free of worries.


End file.
